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4 easy ways to design your own robot

however you call it customize, remix , mods, redesign, transform, decorate, to personalize your own robot are just words for the limitless creations you can do with Otto DIY

May 15, 2018

Sometimes you just want your Otto to stand out among all other robots made in the world, that is when creativity and imagination come into play and it is actually very easy to do with Otto robot, once we have broad tools to helps us to create a whole new world of characters and stories to create STEAM games that enable the "Art and Design" skills in our students as innovative skills to train the lateral thinking; in this article we will introduce our 4 favorite ways of customize your own robot:

Teacher robotics class of 11-13 year olds finished their personalized Otto bots in time for the Great Dance Off at our local Comic Con-style event. They were a big hit! - by Caroline Hunter

1. Customizer Application in Thingiverse

Do you want to make your Otto DIY robot bigger or smaller more fat or skinnier, adapt to a different board or just simply have fun designing and customizing your own Otto? well is very easy! get a Thingiverse account, open the customizer App and start to create your own remixes! 

The App is very intuitive just need to tune the parameters as you need to "create your thing" that will generate automatically all STL files ready for 3D print

"You just have to modify the parameters on the left and preview the result of the 3d print partes on the right"

Arduino UNO Otto DIY 3D printed - by Esra Pınar Yusuf

2. Paper-craft skins and stickers

As mentioned in the previous post, you can easily create new characters based on the shape of ? Otto we find already many tools online that help you to just download cut and print these character and to make it more easy we created a white FREE template for #Ottobuilders who wants to draw, color, paint on top of the cube-craft and dress on Otto. And we already created some common cool characters and will continue adding more by request, so if you need the paper-craft for your favorite character just comment section at the end of this post

"You can also just start by using flat paper masks that fit in the ultrasound sensor and remain there without extra glue"

3. 3D printing mods and remixes

simple tools are not enough and you really need to take your imagination to the limit, in this case you need some 3D modeling tools help like Thinkercad for beginners you can use this template, if you are more experienced you can also jump directly to a CAD tool like FreeCAD or Autodesk Fusion 360 to add extra feature like arms and wheels

"The good news is that the design of Otto is again completely FREE and available for all this platforms and there are plenty of guides online for all this software to learn and have fun"

Otto Santa & Nut cracker - by Dream factory 

4. Ultrasonic accessories

Most of the time you just want to combine works of other by mixing objects to create something new, well Lucidwolf made it easier for all future Otto builders out there just download some cool and very simple to make 3D print or laser cut accessories here and start to create!

It is quite interesting how a simple pair of glasses and masks can change the appearance and look of your robot by keeping that "Ottoness" You can also use Tinkercad for this specially now with Codeblocks like we did for this mustache glasses combo

Imagine all cool stuff you can attach to Otto face from sunglasses, to mustaches, beard, masks, new faces even hats with some tweaks.

Bonus redesign the whole robot for new applications!

This is a more advanced approach that requires to change both code and shape, but you will get there if you are around the communuity

Small bipeds are the biggest and broadest family among open source robots, in Otto DIY we like people that not only copy but change, 3D print, play, remix, make new mods or redesign and then share their robots

Together as community we are collaborating worldwide to expand the reach and capabilities of open robots, making robotics more accessible to everyone and bridging the gender gap

Are you a "creator type of person"? 

Maybe you think you are not, but we are all inventors in some sense, you just need to find inspiration and we have a community full of that!